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Quicktime Under Carpet

I’ve known Matt Hunter since our days toiling away in the offices of an “alternative news weekly” In Western Massachusetts and we had often discussed the possibility of a music video collaboration with his band New Radiant Storm King. Nothing ever really made it beyond the yammering stage until he completed the score for my feature Broken (along with Liz Bustamante) in the fall of 2005. I was finishing the final digital effects for the film and NRSK’s first record for their new label was pending in February. So, eager to feed off the momentum from Broken, I rented space in a haunted former Tampax factory in Three Rivers, MA and we got all up in the dark arts of the green screen.

The raw footage for the guts of the video—the newspaper/microfilm segment—was all captured on consumer-grade mini-DV cameras, composited and heavily filtered in After Effects, rendered out in 12-15 second chunks and edited in Final Cut Pro; a process that I mistakenly thought would be painless and straightforward. After months of negotiating an obstacle course of marathon render times, system crashes and mock-headline Photoshop tedium, I came to the belated conclusion that I was in dire need of an upgrade. Yeah. And that is where I’m at right now, to quote venerable mic jockey Dicky Barrett.